Congratulations ISAMBARDS (University of Bristol)
CIUK 2023 Cluster Challenge Champions
- Teams of up to six students will complete a number of online challenges over the weeks leading up to the conference, followed by a series of challenges during the event itself on 7-8 December.
- Based on the CIUK competition, a CIUK team will be identified to compete in the International Supercomputing (ISC 2024) Student Cluster Challenge in June 2024.
- Both undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to participate.
- Travel and accommodation is provided for teams during the conference in Manchester in December.
Following the success of our Student Cluster Challenges at CIUK 2020, CIUK 2021 and CIUK 2022 the competition will return in 2023 for it's fourth edition. As in 2022 this years' Student Cluster Competition will be a hybrid competition with a series of online challenges leading up to the conference followed by some physical, hands-on challenges during the conference itself.
The agenda for the competition is as follows:
Monday 6 November – Challenge 3 Presentation - OCF and EAS Wednesday 8 November – Challenge 3 (ONLINE CHALLENGE) - OCF and EAS Monday 20 November – Challenge 4 Presentation - Boston Ltd Wednesday 22 November – Challenge 4 (ONLINE CHALLENGE) - Boston Ltd Friday 8 December – Challenge 8 (10am) - OCF and EAS / Results announced (pm)
The points scoring for the competition is the same for every round. The team that wins the challenge will be awarded 30pts. All other teams will then be awarded points based on the performance against the winning teams score. For example: if the first challenge has a maximum of 100pts available and the winning team scores 90 out of 100 that team will receive the maximum 30 competition points. If the team in second place scores 80 out of 100 they will receive 27pts because their score is 89% of the winning score (90pts) so they get 89% of the maximum 30pts available to the winning team. If the team in 3rd place scores 70 out of 100 they will receive 23pts because their score is 78% of the winning score (90pts) so they receive 78% of the maximum 30pts available to the winning team. All points are rounded up or down to the nearest full number. We do not score half points.
Final Leader Board
1
| Isambards
| 229 - CHAMPIONS
|
2
| ClusDur | 216
|
3
| StrathClust
| 187
|
4
| Bath Over Flow
| 181
|
5
| Scared to Compile
| 153
|
6
| The Compute Cortex
| 137
|
7
| Parallel Pioneers
| 124
|
8
| O(log natee)
| 121
|
9
| Save The World
| 114
|
10
| Aligned Resource
| 111
|
11
| Ctrl-Alt-Delete
| 100
|
12
| Imperial Bytes
| 74
|
13
| ImParallel (Withdrawn)
| 54
|
Challenge 8 RESULTS with OCF
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- The Compute Cortex (94/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (92/100)
- Isambards (85/100)
- Scared to Compile (81/100)
- ClusDur (77/100)
- StrathClust (76/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (55/100)
- Aligned Resource (51/100)
- Bath Over Flow (45/100)
- O(log natee) (41/100)
- Save The World (16/100)
- Imperial Bytes (0/100)
- ImParallel (0/100)
Challenge 7 RESULTS with Alces Flight
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- Bath Over Flow (100/100)
- Isambards (95/100)
- StrathClust (95/100)
- ClusDur (90/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (80/100)
- O(log natee) (75/100)
- The Compute Cortex (75/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (73/100)
- Scared to Compile (72/100)
- Aligned Resource (68/100)
- Save The World (60/100)
- Imperial Bytes (0/100)
- ImParallel (0/100)
Challenge 6 RESULTS with Boston
The maximum score available for this challenge was 90 points:
- ClusDur (42/90)
- StrathClust (42/90)
- Isambards (41/90)
- The Compute Cortex (40/90)
- Scared to Compile (38/90)
- Bath Over Flow (36/90)
- O(log natee) (12/90)
- Aligned Resource (12/90)
- Save The World (0/90)
- Parallel Pioneers (0/90)
- Imperial Bytes (0/90)
- ImParallel (0/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (0/100)
Challenge 5 RESULTS with Logicalis
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:- ClusDur (86.5/100)
- Ismabards (80/100)
- Scared to Compile (59/100)
- StrathClust (57/100)
- Bath Over Flow (53.5/100)
- Save The World (35/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (30/100)
- Aligned Resource (21/100)
- Imperial Bytes (20/100)
- O(log natee) (0/100)
- The Compute Cortex (0/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (0/100)
- ImParallel (0/100)
Challenge 4 RESULTS with BOSTON and NVIDIA
The Boston challenge was aimed at applying AI to a scientific problem - in this case, training a neural network to categorize tropical cyclones in order to help in predicting their impact. The dataset was composed of satellite images of cyclones with associated text with properties such as velocity. Teams were given a Jupyter lab-based series of notebooks describing the problem and going though the different steps needed to get to a working model, such as data augmentation, and the various different hyper-parameters which can be tweaked to affect the model performance. Given this working model, the teams were challenged to see if they could improve the accuracy by experimenting and tuning the training of the model.
Boston provided an NVIDIA DGX H100 server to run the challenge: using the multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology of the H100 GPUs, each team were given 6 labs to allow them to experiment in parallel with other team members, running across 2 GPUs. This meant 24 students could run at once on the 8-GPU system - allowing greater productivity for their experiments, and making good use of the system.
All of the teams completed the challenge, with some interesting approaches to modifications from adjusting batch size through to using an entirely new neural network. Teams were scored on the accuracy of their revised models.
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- Isambards (100/100)
- Save the World (100/100)
- StrathClust (92/100)
- Bath Over Flow (85/100)
- O(log natee) (83/100)
- Imperial Bytes (83/100)
- The Compute Cortex (81/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (81/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (80/100)
- Aligned Resource (70/100)
- ClusDur (63/100)
- Scared to Compile (30/100)
- ImParallel (0/100)
Challenge 3 RESULTS with OCF and EAS
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- ClusDur (92/100)
- Isambards (80/100)
- Scared to Compile (65/100)
- Save The World (61/100)
- Bath Over Flow (59/100)
- ImParallel (59/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (55/100)
- StrathClust (51/100)
- O(log natee) (50/100)
- The Compute Cortex (46/100)
- Imperial Bytes (21/100)
- Aligned Resource (21/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (6/100)
Challenge 2 RESULTS with Logicalis
The Logicalis challenge to the teams was aimed at storage performance. With the topic of the conference being “productive supercomputing”, it is of very little benefit to have equipment sat idle – and so the ability to feed compute environments with data fast enough whist at the same time being able to write that information somewhere without delay is very important.
With that in mind, the teams were asked to both run benchmarks for storage and demonstrate performance profiling of a Lustre filesystem provisioned in collaboration with our partner, DDN. The teams were then scored on performance improvements ascertained from their baseline runs.The ability to create tests is only as important as the ability to reproduce them, and so specific scoring was given to documentation and invocation procedures with some innovative approaches undertaken and some great profiling work carried out.
The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- Isambards (92/100)
- ClusDur (80/100)
- Bath Over Flow (55/100)
- Scared to Compile (52/100)
- Imperial Bytes (48/100)
- StrathClust (44/100)
- Aligned Resource (43/100)
- Save The World (27/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (23/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (22/100)
- The Compute Cortex (22/100)
- ImParallel (21/100)
- O(log natee) (20/100)
Challenge 1 RESULTS with Alces Flight
Alces focused the students on building and benchmarking HPC clusters using private cloud technology and their cutting-edge toolsets (with a few red herrings along the way). The maximum score available for this challenge was 100 points:
- Isambards (80/100)
- ClusDur (78/100)
- Bath Over Flow (76/100)
- ImParallel (75/100)
- O(log natee) (74/100)
- StrathClust (67/100)
- Parallel Pioneers (64.5/100)
- Save The World (54/100)
- Imperial Bytes (50/100)
- Aligned Resource (45/100)
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete (34/100)
- Scared to Compile (29/100)
- The Compute Cortex (25/100)
CIUK 2023 Cluster Challenge Teams
CIUK 2023 Cluster Challenge Partner Companies
|
|  |
The winners of the first three competitions - Durham University (
2020 and
2022) and a combined team from Bristol and Bath Universities (
2021) - went on to represent CIUK in the ISC Cluster Competition and once again we will be offering our winning team this opportunity, with a place at
ISC’24 already confirmed.
.png)
